12 JULY — 12 AUGUST 2018

Akram Khan Company

iTMOi (in the mind of igor)

Life. Rupture. Death. A hurricane of flickering lights and powerful music elucidates the unfolding drama. Multi award-winning British choreographer Akram Khan presents a spectacular response to Igor Stravinsky’s and Vaclav Nijinsky’s groundbreaking piece “Le Sacre du Printemps”, featuring the dancers of his company and music by three extraordinary composers: Nitin Sawhney, Jocelyn Pook and Ben Frost. A dispute broke out at the world première of “Sacre” on 29 May 1913 in the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris: radically new music and dance that broke up the established boundaries made the audience lose their composure.
Now Khan presents his take on Stravinsky and “the way he changed the world of classical music by evoking emotions not by expressivity but by means of patterns.” By means of patterns in the composition that are rooted in the story about a woman who keeps on dancing until she dies. In Khan’s piece there is a large, smoking ball that swings like the pendulum of fate, and the dancing woman is drawn into its sphere of influence. So is a man: connected to the stage space with red ropes he is thrown back and forth by powers pulling them. This rite of spring is a tensile test for the dancers and a deeply impressive experience for the audience.